I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected
is a collaborative, hybrid composition by Chris Cheney and Amy Lawless: part essay, part poem and part social media collage. In the composition of this book, the authors cannibalized traditional research methods for a more personalized, technology-based process. Meditating upon Kurt Schwitters’ notion that "the medium is as unimportant as I am myself," they confront historical traumas through the body of real and virtual environments. Establishing online personas on Myspace, Yelp and Twitter, they explore the feelings that attach themselves to these expressions of self, the real sense of desire, connection, affirmation and friendship, as well as possibilities of destruction and loss. The relationship to the mother, a candlepin bowling league and an online Korean roleplaying group are the social environs through which the authors grapple with their own sense of isolation and otherness in the digital age, the blind energy of desire and the strangeness of tears.